Conclusion

Abstract

Jonathan Culler argues that more than any other literary form, ‘the novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse in and through which it articulates the world’.¹ During the course of its first century the orphaned protagonist of English fiction — and with it society’s self-representation — makes a varied journey. The orphan’s progress in novels from Defoe to Austen charts the development of the individual subject as well as the changes in society generating this figure. As a cypher, an empty signifier, the orphan has proved to be a useful trope for novelists to think about what it means to become a subject, what conditions are attached to the social place that an individual can claim, or under what circumstances that social place can be changed. In the fiction of the ‘long eighteenth century’, the progress of the orphan describes, or even prescribes, the way to attain subjectivity.